You fight the 1000 on the left, I’ll fight the 1000 on the right!
Old BooksI do a little short story writing on the side, when my head can’t take any more code. Mostly it’s just me sharpening my writing blade, but it’s something important to me, so I’m willing to spend a little to make it better. To that end, I realized that I’ve read a lot of modern speculative fiction but I haven’t really looked at the books that started this modern age of “what if?” stories. So I started looking around for the bigguns and compiled a list of books I needed to read, at the very least, before I wrote much more for myself.
The Heinlein and Asimov books I ordered because they’re simply classics in the genre. Ringworld I ordered because many claim it to be a classic, and many others discount it entirely. It’s worth seeing what the fuss is about, the way I see it. Well, I went to Amazon to order them all and when I was done the cart was over $70. No, this will not do. I had a thought, then, “These are all very old books. Why am I buying new copies?” So I went back through Amazon and hit the Amazon Marketplace for each of them. If you’ve never used the Marketplace, the way it works is that small book sellers and warehouses and such (even individuals) have old books that they want to sell. Amazon gives them a flat rate for the shipping, no matter what, and then they can post a price on top of that. As a result, many old books go for a penny each and the seller relies on the shipping (I pay $3.99 — I don’t know how much they get) to cover the difference. After I finished replacing them with the Marketplace sellers, the bill was around $40 instead. Much better. (I tried to get all the books from one seller in the hopes that the shipping price would go down, but no luck; it’s a flat rate per book.)
It’s the old paper smell that reminded me of my grandfather’s books. The smell of a summer in a public library, cracking open books from the late 70s about the atom and physics when I knew that almost everything I was about to read had already changed, and it was only barely ’88. It was the smell from a quiet Saturday poking through books around the house that my mother had brought home from school libraries that were sloughing off their older, more unread books, trying to find something worth my time and finding that one old book about “the future” and seeing that ideas that were fantastic twenty years prior still were. Every time I took a breath of the old paper a new piece of my childhood came back to the surface, bringing me to school, to home, to my maternal grandfather’s home, to my paternal grandparents’ house in the country. Just looking at the aged paper reminded me of the summers I would spend in my dad’s parents’ home in Tennessee where my grandmother would have bookshelves double-thick with books. When we would visit, I’d always grab a couple of them and go to the back room of the house, open a window and turn on the radio softly to US 101 and start poking through them. I remember it quite well now, the smell of the book, the squeak of the old bed, and the window so thick with paint that you’d lose a fingertip every time you opened it and it slammed to the top with a twang from some hidden rail. It spurred memories of the sound of the washer going in the oversized bathroom with the baby blue bathtub with the sliding privacy glass doors. The house had a wonderful sense of being turned off that I simply can’t get myself to replicate with my own home. The only recurring sound was the refrigerator cycling on and off. Near-complete silence and peace. Now I sit here with an old book of my own. It has its own history, of course, but I’ve adopted it and made it a bit of my history. It’s also spurred something inside me that wants to find an older edition, no matter how torn up, of any book I want rather than buying a new one. A feeling that’s rather strange for me, considering I’m very much a “don’t break the spine” kind of person. To want to have an aged book is a little odd, but it turns out that in the hustle of life I’d moved into such a new-centric lifestyle that I’d lost touch with some of the benefits of the old. Anchored in time as they are, objects have an amazing ability to bring us back to that moment of their creation, and with it bring the entire world as it was to our minds. While there’s a certain pleasure to the new, there’s a very real excitement that comes with the old. I’ve always saved things for far longer than is reasonable, partly because I’m too lazy or distracted to sort through them, and partly because I know that when I sort through them I’ll remember the world as it was then. I don’t sleep so well, and many believe that forgetfulness is tied to a lack of proper sleep. Whatever the cause, my memory of my life is horrendously incomplete. I go beyond forgetting last week and well into forgetting my life for years at a time until one item can anchor me and my mind can grasp onto it and bring the world as it was into focus. It’s a very exciting feeling, and even something as silly as going through the filing cabinet and seeing old invoices or bills can trigger it. We’re too centered on the new in America. It’s little wonder that we Americans laugh at Eddie Izzard’s one-liner: “I’m from Europe, where the history comes from.” It is at once haughty and humbling. I’m not a thrill-seeker, but I’ll certainly accept with gratitude the rush of nostalgia that comes with a yellowed and well-read book from fifty years ago. Life goes on, but you just try to get me to go along with it without kicking and screaming a little.
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Quotes
“The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.”— ILN 9-18-09 – G. K. Chesterton
I sometimes get that way, with books or with music. Sometimes when I hear an old rock song from a few years ago, for example, it takes me back to the rock station we used to have, which always gave me something to listen to on the road. It really makes you miss your youth.
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